The Home Straights

Explorer departed Freeport making a fraction of her usual speed so as not to arrive too early in Miami, which was now a relatively paltry 170Km away across the North-West Providence channel, and then the Straights of Florida. The three of us paid a visit to the Next cruise lounge and dallied with the temptation to book next year’s cruise then and there - fortunately Alex was there to act as the voice of good sense. At dinner, we shared a table with a couple from the bay area in California with whom we chatted about Star Trek the Animated series; the husband was charmingly apologetic for merely liking Star Trek, rather than loving it like his wife.

Our first show of the evening was Garet Wang’s ‘Forever Ensign’ stand-up comedy; it was strange to see him making fart and knob jokes but to his credit they were really funny. Many of the other celebrity guests were in the front rows; Denise Crosby briefly reprised her role as chief of security to deal with a heckler. Heading over to the main theatre, Marina Sertis introduced ‘inside the actor’s studio with Brent Spiner’. Brent opened with some stories, then the bulk of the show consisted of Brent interviewing William Shatner. The interview didn’t always flow as one might hope; when Mr Shatner brought that up Brent quipped quite accurately (and more than a little cuttingly) that ‘its not the questions that are the problem’.

After the show we scrambled back to the cabin to put our luggage out by 23:00 as we had been instructed, before rounding out the last night with another game of Fluxx in the library. The designers of the Star Trek Fluxx games were onboard and we did search about for them, following a lead to that they might be in the Cafe on the promenade. The Fluxx inventors were nowhere to be seen, but we did find the Entertainment Cruise Productions team already well advanced in changing the decor ready for their next voyage: the 80s Cruise underscoring that our voyage was over.Read more